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Monday, June 5, 2017

The Interweaving of Books and Life

I
have just finished reading the advance reading copy of a transporting book,
found it deeply meaningful, and am now flailing around, mentally and
emotionally, trying to find a way to write about it here. Every book is more
than a description of it can ever be, but that truth seems particularly
striking and poignant to me in this case.

She
Read To Us In the Late Afternoons: A Life in Novels, by Kathleen Hill,
takes its title from the author’s memory of her mother’s reading to her and her
brother, one winter, A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens. Years later, she
recalls her mother’s inflections and tone when she herself is reading Proust
one afternoon a week to an aging friend and realizing the importance of a
reader’s voice and the intimate space created by sharing what is more often
experienced in solitary fashion.

Although
she has surely read thousands of books, only six are featured in this beautiful
literary memoir. (I first wrote that sentence to say she had “chosen” only six,
but does one choose the pieces of one’s life that make the deepest memories?) I
have read all but the first mentioned, Lucy Gayheart; however, readers who
have read fewer or even none of those that resonate so strongly in the author’s
life – readers,
that is: those who sometimes wonder if they are perhaps too involved in books,
reading instead of living – should still find this book resonating in
their own.

One
of the reasons I am having such a difficult time finding a way to write about
this book is that it did for me what I know it will do for others whose lives
sometimes focus on books to the near-exclusion of world events or even family
and friends. In each essay (they are chronologically arranged), Kathleen Hill
writes not only of the novel important to her in that period of her life but
also gives biographical details – where she was living, how she came to be
there, what else was happening in her life and how she felt and responded. And
so, while I was very much engrossed in her stories, I also found myself
drifting off into my own memories and books I read in circumstances forever
associated, for me, with the book then read – all of which has nothing to do
with this particular book, only with my experience of it. But then, what Hill
writes of is exactly that -- the experience of her readings of
the six novels.

And
so reading this book brings back to me some of my own reading memories....

***

One
summer in Barry County, Michigan, I read Moscow Farewell, by George Feifer,
and the closer I got to the end of the book, the more carefully I rationed the
remaining pages, so I recognized from my own life Hill’s report of doing the
same with her listening friend, Diana Trilling, when they were reading Proust -- not
wanting a book to end, not wanting to close the cover on the last page, because
to do so is the closest experience a modern reader has to being ejected from the
Garden of Eden. I can explain it no other way, though surely Proust’s vision of
his friends growing old and unrecognizable, like the desperate, dysfunctional
Moscow of the Soviet era, can hardly be called an Eden. It isn’t that the world
of the book is idyllic but that we are living so fully in its world that
leaving it is a little death, a bereavement in the midst of our own life.

I
had a vegetable garden behind our old farmhouse that summer, and after reading
a page or two, trying to read slowly, savoring every word, I would close the
book, take a deep breath, and plunge outdoors to weed for a while. And as
Kathleen did when reading aloud to Diana, I rationed myself to shorter and
shorter bits as the remaining pages grew fewer. Outdoors there was a song
sparrow that sang on the fencepost behind my garden, and I remember also a
beautiful spotted salamander we found in the well pit, the breeze through
sweet-smelling hay stacked in the barn, butterflies my little son and I lured
to the driveway by filling holes with water from the hose, spittlebugs we
discovered on weeds in the unmowed “side yard” (a.k.a. meadow on the other side
of the drive), and the discouraging state of our kitchen floor, with its old
linoleum torn up to reveal the hardwood boards underneath almost irremediably
(though I’m sure they have been remediated by now) gunked up with old black tar
– all are connected to my reading of Moscow Farewell. I could have spent
every waking minute that summer scraping away at the tar on the kitchen floor,
but instead I fled to Moscow and to my garden and to the fields. My son and I
climbed a small rise we called “Mulberry Hill,” accompanied by our large dog
and our feisty little tiger cat. The cat led the little parade, her waving tail
in tall grasses showing us the way. Years later I would sometimes call another
dog, Nikki, by love names inspired by Feifer’s book: Nikita, Nikitushka.

Milan
Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being I read in Paris,
taking the Metro almost every day from the bustling 9th
arrondissement to the serene 8th, trading commercial traffic and
narrow pavement for the cool, verdant, peaceful atmosphere of the Parc Monceau.
I would change my seat several times during each day’s reading, moving now
into, now out of the sun, and taking the occasional turn around waters and
“ruins” when tired of sitting. I lived inside that first Kundera novel (later I
read several more, loving some and absolutely hating others, something that has
never happened to me with any other author), though not always in the way the
author could have foreseen. Reading it in French (L’insoutenable légerté de
l’être
– magic name!), I sometimes mistook the meaning of a word, and so for quite a
while I envisioned the chapeau melon not as black but
the color of a cantaloupe. I know, I know! But that’s how I saw it, day after
day, for many chapters. Living those hours in Prague, however, barely conscious
for long stretches of time of the city around me, when I looked up and rose
from my seat and walked to a new one, somehow I felt I belonged in Paris and in
the Parc Monceau more securely for having entered Kundera’s world in
translation, through my own second language. Kundera gave me Prague, and Prague
gave me entry to Paris.

As
readers, we can be stubborn and prejudiced, and for years I took perverse pride
in saying that life was too short to read Proust. It seemed such a clever thing
to say, proving my independence from the canon. Then one summer, somehow, I
fell into Combray.

Of
everything described in this beginning of Remembrance of Things Past, it was the
hawthornes that became my obsession. David and I would go for a drive in the
summer evening, and my eyes searched roadsides and fields for hawthornes,
wanting that tangible connection to my reading and nearly blind to everything
else. But no, not blind. I did see what was there, but it was what I did not see that filled my
mind, and this recalls Sartre’s Being and Nothingness and a section of a
paper I wrote on that work, in which “Pierre’s dog” can see nothing in the cafe
but the absence of Pierre. How much do we miss in each present moment because
our minds are filled with what is not there? Well, I read the first volume of Remembrance
of Things Past
again and again, became bored with and laid aside the second, but at last, a
few years back, leaped ahead to read The Past Recaptured. Wonderful,
wonderful!

And
now, searching Books in Northport for “hawthornes” (I know I did a post of them
once), I find instead a post on books I lived, and there is one left out of
this current post, One Hundred Years of Solitude. Yes,
I remember, that summer I was reading Marquez I wanted nothing more than escape
from what my own life had then become: hours in a windowless office, surrounded
by tall file cabinets holding “history” I felt had no place in a university and
yet for which I was responsible. How I mourned the erasure of the old
Department of Agriculture, in one of the original ivy-covered buildings on the
hill, and how I missed the green, humid world of its greenhouse!

***

If
I seem to have digressed egregiously from the task at hand, it is my way of
telling you that you will do the same in the intervals when you put Kathleen Hill’s
book aside. You will enter her reading worlds eagerly and be enchanted by their
variety and depth, and you will follow the threads weaving together the books
she was reading to the life she was living at the same time and her later
reflections on those connections. You will be at times astonished at her
candor, for she does not spare herself or hide her shortcomings or failures,
whether telling of a schoolmate abandoned to his lonely fate, acceptance of
social hierarchy in Nigeria, or loneliness in a French village, where for week
after week she and her husband somehow could not connect with the world around
them. And then when you put the book down to change your seat or return to the
demands of your own life, you will recall, because you are a reader, too, those books in whose
worlds you
lived and also the world that surrounded you at the time of those
readings, and so your experience of this book will add to all those other
weavings and layers of memory that are your life.

Does
a reader, “nose buried in a book,” miss life while turning pages, eyes
following lines of print? If it is life, is it a bizarre way to live?

Hill’s
answer to the question comes at last in her final essay. Between Hill and her
friend Diana Trilling, there is a 20-year age difference, and when Diana speaks
of her failing eyesight and her regret that she will not, because of it, be able
to re-read Proust, Hill quickly offers to come one afternoon a week to read
aloud from Remembrance of Things Past, a project that takes the two women six years
to complete. Naturally, there is conversation as well as reading during those
afternoons, but that is all I am going to say. No description, no preview. You
must read that essay for yourself, and you must read the preceding essays
first, in order. I am sorry to tell you that She Read to Us in the Late
Afternoons will
not be released until mid-autumn, but I will tell you that it deserves your
anticipation. As a reader, you will not want to miss this experience.